Fifteen easy miles — I coasted on tired legs today — the last four racing home a thunderstorm. I was heading east, rounded a big 90-degree turn to face a big, dark, lightning belching cloud looming to the south. Which was great, because that was the way I needed to go.
So pedal harder, to a red light, onto a road with traffic, and then a long downhill into the light which shall not ever be green. And then back up the last hill to home. I was within sight of my road when the serious raindrops started, so I did just make it back in time.
And I did web site stuff for most of the rest of the day. First here and then on a site I’m doing for an organization and then also the LOMO blog. I’m mostly behind on everything, but I’ll catch up eventually, or it will somehow become prioritized and the least important things will be conveniently overlooked. That is the way of it sometimes.
CORDOVA, Ala. — Everybody in town heard about it.
Sounds juicy.
It was discussed openly and in whispers, over the phone and in the church pews. When it was brought up at school, the curious were quickly shushed. Eventually, the whole thing got pushed aside by other concerns, a bit of nastiness better forgotten, or judged never to have occurred at all.
So it is a rumor, then.
But Madison Phillips says it is true. He says that he and his mother, Annette Singleton, both black, were turned away from a church shelter by a white woman on the afternoon of April 27, the day of the tornadoes. And within hours, Ms. Singleton and two of Madison’s young friends, who had been huddling with him in his house within yards of that church, were dead.
That’s horrible.
There is little agreement about what happened, or whether it happened at all, and the full truth may never be known. Madison says he did not recognize the woman. The only other witness, an older man who is known around town for his frequent run-ins with the law and fondness for alcohol, is saying that he did not see the situation firsthand, but only talked to Madison’s mother as she was coming and going.
So, clearly, this is grounded in solid evidence, unimpeachable by the highest tribunal of fair men and women.
But Madison’s story has stayed consistent, prompting a nagging, uneasy question about what kinds of things are possible, still possible, in a small Southern town.
Assertion does not equal evidence. They’re unfamiliar with this notion in the newsroom, it seems. It goes on for a while, delving in stuff the author doesn’t really care about, but he finally gets back to the important part.
There is a nearly unanimous conviction among blacks here that the incident described by Madison Phillips not only could happen here, but did. Yet there is little vocal outrage.
The whole story goes on like this, trading in speculation, fully admitting that no one knows the answer, only that everyone in town might be racist. There’s a restaurant named Rebel Queen, after all.
One man has an alternative theory.
“Nobody hardly knew her,” said Theodore Branch, 74, who has been the city’s only black council member for 36 years. “If you live here and everybody knows you, it’s a different situation.”
So naturally you don’t hear from him again. What he’s talking about, though:
Ms. Singleton, who was 46, was relatively new to town. She went to church 45 minutes to the southeast in Birmingham. The two boys who died with her, Jonathan and Justin Doss, ages 12 and 10, were from a poor white family who lived in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Cordova, where Madison and his mother had lived until recently.
That’s the 18th paragraph in the story, where the race of the other two victims in a story evoking racism finally landed. Eighteenth. In the business we call that buried.
I leave you with Atticus Rominger, a former reporter with an award-winning pedigree. And, sadly, that’s about the only way you’ll see those storm stories in the media again.
Just for fun:
If I taught public speaking classes I would show this at the beginning of every semester. Somehow, he did not get the nomination.
